@Dashrender said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:
@EddieJennings said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:
This may seem simplistic, but if I were in this scenario, on which side of the MSP / VAR would I stand?
A person hires me to help spec out a server for their office. I'm paid to help them determine how much RAM, storage, processors, etc. they need.
This part is clear, I'm being paid for advice; thus, MSP.
A point of clarity - advising only this is not being an MSP - you'r not managing anything (managed service provider). ITSP or Consultancy would be better terms for this portion... heck - the whole thing, including recommending a hardware vendor, because again, you're not managing anything.
True. I ought to have used those other terms.

@kelly said in How Can the FTE Model Compete with the MSP Model?:
Maybe not directly for the company, but the MSP has to recoup the costs of time and travel somehow, and that will affect rates if you're going to stay profitable.
That is very true, no denying that. But you can build those costs in. There are certainly costs involved, but there are savings too. You have to look at the whole picture.
In this example, we have housing costs about 20% lower than they do, our fuel is way cheaper ($.25 I bet), and our Internet is a fraction of the cost (about 10% the cost, I kid you not.) Going local to them would require us to raise prices, traveling to them is trivial.

@carnival-boy said in MSP or VAR or just avoid:
For an MSP to be truly agnostic it would either have to massive (to be able to employ both Oracle and SQL Server experts), or it is full of generalists who can support both but lack expertise in either.
That's part of the goal, or typical goals, of moving to the MSP model. They bring more scale and with scale comes agnosticism (the move towards it, but obtaining it as you pointed out.) You might not have expertise or experience with every OS out there, but even a moderately small MSP like NTG regularly supports and works with many databases. Not Oracle, which isn't a big deal as it has essentially no place in any intentional deployment, but MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, REDIS, MongoDB, SQLite, etc. all regularly supported.
MSPs are way more likely to have the desire and ability to grow support skill sets, although this can happen internally as well. But internal skill growth is costly and risky to maintain. For an MSP, skill growth increases potential customer support options. So MSPs have more incentive to consider things they've not done specifically before than internal IT departments do.
Nothing is perfect, but MSPs make agnosticism easier and more likely.

@mike-davis said in How MSPs provide their services:
@scottalanmiller said in How MSPs provide their services:
That's a lot of investment for a system like that. If you have hundreds of customers, it can make sense. But it takes a lot of customers to recoup the lost time into that system. It can work out well for a traditional MSP, but depends on large scale standardization to justify the investment.
I don't know about hundreds of customers. The number of end points might be more relevant. For me at about 10 MSP customers I can justify the investment. When you look at the time it takes to set up something like a zabbix server and maintaining a WSUS server vs not having to that helps make it worth it. Missed revenue because you didn't have a system in place to capture every minute hurts.
It would be a blend, I'm sure. A single customer with a million end points wouldn't make sense because you'd use more traditional tools in a single customer scenario. And a hundred with only one end point each wouldn't do it either. So some combination of enough end points for volume and enough customers for complexity put together.

@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@dashrender said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Same problem for the vendors. If you are dealing with unpatched spares, so are they. Having worked for some of the big ones, I know that their supply chains struggle to get parts, too. Heck, IBM couldn't deliver a server internally in more than six months, imagine how hard it is to get support parts!
Shit like this just blows my mind.
Parts Bins, internal supplies for labs, and customer supply chains are all completely different (well IBM may have been a gong show). Dell and HPE staff can't just go grab something off the line, with Mfg you have to account for the costs and someone gets to pay (and often at a premium to prevent abuse) for those internal servers.
Parts Bins and stocking those are different, and supply chain for a OEM might actually be different in the us than EMEA.
At IBM< we were an external customer, even though we were inside IBM. We showed up just like any external enterprise customer. So their inability to support was universal.

reason for this, to me, is partially induced by the amount of work/materials required in a company to get the job done.
When you start it is really close to what you do in your house, so you go to the mall and buy a router, a laptop and so... you do not think about planning, it is just another piece of HW you need, like the smartphone. You do not hire a consultant to buy a smartphone.
a SMB with no more then 10 people will need not so much, maybe just an intervention now or then, let say to change a burned router every 3/5 years, or a broken disk in a NAS. This stuff is so rare that the SMB do not hire competent people to manage it - they just buy stuff like in their own house-, therefore, the SMB has a relevant degree of ignorance on a topic.
the commercial guy in front of the SMB is (apparently) a huge source of information for the SMB, they do not need to go deeper on tech details: they can't even totally understand what the commercial is exposing.
Now you will say: hay, consultants are there for this very topic: let SMB not be fooled/deviated by bad commercial practices.
Yes, but this implies that the SMB has - at least - a bare minimum degree of knowledge about its own ignorance.
Unfortunately they have not. Everything starts with something small, let say a small 2-disk NAS. Hey it worked! now what, oh we need a small server. Hey the commercial guy has solved the problem last time, let's call him again, he will solve it!
Then you start buy stuff and stuff, in the end IT is not the core business it is just like other tools you need to make the job done. period. what matterst is if you have margins.
Here is where you start thinking about consultats. when margins are hard. and the bigger you are the harder to keep margins high. therefore you start minding about what you are doing. And consultants start here. But it is not the IT consultant. the IT consultant is at the end of the queue, first you start with company organization, with people and procedures, THEN you ask for consultancy on tools.

Smart switches are cheaper than managed switches, normally by quite a bit. And they are way easier for a small business to manage as they normally just use a web browser or a simple utility instead of making you use expensive and complex central management tools for SNMP.

@jaredbusch said in MSP charged with extortion:
@tim_g said in MSP charged with extortion:
Yes but they can't do it the day after a missed payment, I think there are rules governing how that works.
I know of no actual laws on this.
No business does it because it will be a death knell for them, but I do not know of laws on the subject for most services.
You set the terms for this when you create a contract. That is the only legally binding document on the matter.
No law that I'm aware in my state/locality. It's part of the contract you agree to.

This really follows along well with this discussion: https://mangolassi.it/topic/11852/why-it-builds-a-house-of-cards
It's far easier to avoid the "house of cards" motivation problems with an MSP than with internal staff.

@John-Nicholson said in The MSP Model fails more often than not.:
@Carnival-Boy said in The MSP Model fails more often than not.:
I'd argue that the more complex it is, the more having good structure and support is important.
I agree and that's where I think internal IT wins. MSPs tend to be very good at IT, but lack the business understanding, because they don't work in the business, they work in IT. Good internal IT staff have both IT and business expertise.
Depends on the MSP If it's one that specializes in a given field (Say Education) they might know how other companies in the same vertical solve a problem.
And value to tackling things from other fields, too. So often you see companies that have the "our industry is special and has special needs" like video processing. But if someone from another field looks at it without that attitude they realize that their needs are very basic, simple and standard.

I think working in isolated, non-IT companies where there is no peer support at all it might be easy to forget how much training is endemic to any organization's core. If you are a lithography company and have many litho machines, many litho workers (even, say half a dozen of them) there is a natural cross training and sharing of knowledge, an automatic introduction to different equipment, styles and techniques. Even when no effort is put into training and development, which is effectively unheard of for any business in its core operations, there is a natural training effect through knowledge training. This is why cities with a high skill density for a given field have higher end people and pay more than other markets (NY for IT, SV for SE, Detroit for Automotive engineering, etc.)

@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
I will give you that, if the reasoning was sound and their fired the MSP anyhow, the client is probably a bad client and won't keep MSPs for very long because they are unreasonable, but let's not go down that path.
And that's why MSPs fire clients just as often as vice versa. But when you, as an MSP, start with a new client, they always leave out the big about having been fired and act like they did the firing.

@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@Dashrender said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@Dashrender said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
Yeah, but we can't access that. It's $20 for us. That's just the price, can't get around it.
If you're really planning on dropping all the way to the $4/u/m exchange only plan, then you can probably move to the $5/month plan (you have less than 250 users, right? and get what I have today.
MSP, doesn't work that way. We need our E3 plans. Seriously, we don't have any option for the $5 stuff.
then you're paying $20 already - so what difference does it make?
That we can't get the $5 plan. So we can't have OneNote and SharePoint without paying the $16 premium per user. We are going in circles. I'm back to explaining the original price post.
Also, FFS, quit cluttering up the wrong damned thread.

@MattSpeller said:
@RojoLoco Every now and again I miss the wild west cowboy shit I used to get away with. Then I remember the liquor and ... other worse stuff.
No doubt.... {incriminating comments removed}

@Carnival-Boy said:
Some people on here seem to define MSP differently to Wikipedia.
Don't believe that there is anything official. But the term "managed services" is the tip off. People who don't do managed services feel strange using the term as it doesn't reflect what they do in any way. An MSP should be a "provider of managed services."
Lots of firms do a mix of things. NTG will do MSP work if requested, but we don't push it. MSP firms will normally do something else if the price is right. MSPs nearly always mix in VAR work. VARs often offer MSP services.
Sadly, because MSP has become the word that non-technical people use, everyone has had to start using it to refer to themselves even when they know that they are not.